Don’t Bomb Iran

Spending years underwater waiting to blow up a few hundred thousand people is not a very fun job,  so it is hard find crew for nuclear missile submarines.  The British Navy always has trouble getting men for this job (which of course is Necessary to Keep Us Free), but it will need even more crew when it starts to replace its old Trident boomers with a new generation of submarines - running two sets of boats concurrently will need more crew and will thus cause a ‘manning bulge’ .  0ne of the solutions being considered is to let women go to sea  with 50 or more Hiroshimas for the first time. (Another option is to use machines instead of women).   The  UK’s chief auditor has reported in his National Audit Office report on Trident replacement (pg 16 below) that there  are other ‘risk areas’ in the project such  as:
the warhead: which might need to be replaced, but the UK and US are working on this,  and sorry, no cost figures are available at present.   (Such cooperation might well breach Article 1 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which criminalises  giving  nuclear weapons to other countries;  but that is not the Auditor’s problem)

the submarine cost: well, we don’t know: the company has made an offer:  Somewhere between 12 and  20 billion pounds, (that’s a Lot of Money, so as the government auditor, we might look into it sometime in the future).  The auditor acknowledges a major problem: negotiating a good price is hard  when one company has a monopoly on building such submarines, and that company can  tell you when to throw away your old submarines, can charge what it likes, deliver when it likes, and blackmails you with the argument that  it has to build new submarines  now or else it’s submarine-building-experts will retire without teaching new engineers the tricks (unfinished…)….

some quotes from the report:

1.16  There are currently shortages of various trades … within the submarine branch of the Royal Navy. This problem is exacerbated by the introduction of the future class of submarines, since more crews will be required to manage the so-called ‘manning bulge’- the transition phase in which crews will be required to operate both Vanguard and the future class [of submarines] concurrently.

1.17  Possible mitigation actions such as automating processes to reduce crew numbers and introducing female personnel are likely to have a major impact on both operating procedures and submarine design and therefore need to be taken while there is still scope for their incorporation in the latter. The Royal Navy is currently undertaking two studies to determine the likely impact of this issue. The Royal Navy’s Second Sea Lord is responsible for all naval crewing issues and is the owner of this risk, but the Senior Responsible Owner for the deterrent will have a key role in ensuring that the Royal Navy’s work is incorporated into the future deterrent timetable in a timely way.